While not the most urgent or popular feature, many users would enjoy having a minimap.

Dynamic Display
A minimap is a floating display of the current map in miniature. It should automatically update to show changes to the map, including Fog of War.

Minimap Resize
The idea of a minimap is to preview the entire map, but users should be able to adjust the scale by resizing the viewing window of the minimap.

Click to View
Click on a spot in the minimap should automatically center the main viewing window on that spot.

Similarly, clicking and dragging across the minimap should cause the main viewing window to follow along.

View Box
To give users a perspective of the overall map size and what part of the map they are currently viewing, a box should appear on the minimap that contains the portion of the map currently centered in the main viewing window.

Selection Indicator
The position of the current selected unit should be indicated on the minimap in some noticable way.

Unit Radar
Similarly, a feature that is often seen in games is having units on the map appear as color-coded dots on the minimap.

The ability to specify types of units that appear on the player's radar and a view distance would add even more depth to this feature.

This should be an optional feature of course.

Hotkey
The minimap should be easy to open & close with a hotkey, and it should remember its previous position on the screen.

Waypoint Markers
A handy feature that appears in the NWN minimap is the ability to place notes on the minimap to indicate important locations. When you mouse over the waypoint on the minimap, text such as "Green Dragon Tavern" or "Where I hid my treasure" appears in a tooltip.

Last edited by Omnidon on Thu Aug 21, 2008 2:24 am, edited 7 times in total.

Agree, I think a good zoom feature will make most of a minimap redundant (Although Mac users might feel a little differently). My main concern with a minimap is filling up the screen with extraneous information, particularly as zooming can be done so quickly. Combining zooming with a "center map on unit manager selection" is probably more useful, particualrly as units may not even be clearly visible on a minimap unless its something larger than "mini" to my eyes.

I agree that the minimap is far from an urgent feature, but I wouldn't call it redundant. (And I'm a PC-user.)

As a gamer who plays RPGs, Real Time Strategies, and Tactical Shooters both offline and online, I can say with confidence that zoom capabilities and minimaps are both highly complimentary and vital to multi-tasking.

As mentioned in the View Box suggestion, the minimap can be useful for gaining perspective on the location and relative size of your current field of vision.

Also, units don't have to be invisible on the minimap. Many games highlight the important units as color-coded dots. (A suggestion I was intending to add.) This feature could even be expanded into a form of 'radar' for the players.

Being able to pinpoint selected units on the minimap, as mentioned, would be especially useful on a map cluttered with units such as forests.

I would say that the most useful feature of the minimap for me though is being able to jump across the map with a single click. Click to View is how I usually get oriented as it's far faster and more intuitive than zooming out, moving the focus, then zooming back in.

But of course in the end, as with all features, if you don't like it you can just turn it off.

When I saw minimap I immediately thought of it's implementation in Google maps.

Something like that would be very handy. Especially if tied into a larger map. So that we can expand beyond the 40x40 grid. Maybe a 400x400 grid for a running battle. With only the main 40x40 appearing. All of the rest of the action taking place on the minimap.

I could see another option for this might be being able to drop figures from the sideboard or a deployment file straight onto the minimap. Possible not even being seen immediately.

While not a true, interactive minimap, if all you want is a thumbnail overview of a large map, you can place a copy of the current map image in the "Objects" folder, place it on the map window at a smallish size (thumbnail-sized), and set it to be a floating object, so that it's always on-screen.

The example pic below shows a "fake" minimap in use.

Attachments

Faux Minimap.png (997.01 KiB) Viewed 21671 times

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